Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

  Can an entire cathedral be a secret? The Cathedrale de Jean Linard sits hidden in the rolling Berry countryside, near a village so small - Neuvy-Deux-Clochers - that most people drive straight past it without knowing either exists. Jean Linard was a potter. Then he became a sculptor, an engraver, a painter.  When he bought an old flint quarry in 1961, he did what any reasonable person would do: he started building a cathedral in his back garden, ad he kept building it for nearly fifty years, until he died in 2010 He'd been inspired by the Facteur Cheval, a postman in the Drôme who spent thirty-three years constructing a fantastical palace because he tripped over a stone one day and liked its shape. And by Gaudí, who started the Sagrada Família in 1882 and whose church - as you may have noticed - still isn't quite finished. What connected these three men - Linard, Cheval, Gaudi - was simple: they had an idea, and they didn't stop. The stubbornness became the point. Af...

   We live, we are frequently told, in an age of unprecedented connectivity. Platforms connect us. Networks connect us. A man in Copenhagen can, in a matter of a splitsecond, reach a man in Sao Paulo even though he might not have anything particular urgent to say. This is considered progress and a part of modernity. But Rita and I had yesterday the occasion in the Burgundian village Rogny-les-Sept-Ecluses to stand next to a staircase of stone and water which showed that we moderns have of course not invented the idea of connecting stuff. Someone back in the 17th century dreamt of connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel by making a passageway from the Loire river to the Seine. And here on this hill in Burgundy, at the watershed between the two mighty rivers, is the result of that thought.   By building seven locks pressed together in a staircase up a hillside in Rogny, the boats could ascend the twenty-four metres up from the Loire valley.   Twelv...

  The plan was to escape. This is important context! Nordic winters are long and grey and self-serious, and by the end of February Rita and I had reached the point where the darkness stops feeling atmospheric and starts feeling personal. France, we reasoned, would be different. France in early March would be spring. There would be light. There would be warmth. There would be outdoor tables and wine and the specific looseness that comes from sitting in the sun in a country that takes lunch seriously. And then we rented a small house in the town of Sancerre Sancerre sits on a hill in the Loire Valley and is known, globally, for one thing: its white wine. Sauvignon blanc of considerable reputation. Writers have praised it. Sommeliers have wept over it. Restaurants in Copenhagen, London and New York charge serious money for a glass of it. We looked forward to be living at the source.  Now we are, and all is grey. It is cold. It rains every day. Not the dramatic Nordic cold that...

Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction. That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us.  He is probably right, actually. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room were not really enough for the task. They were meant to transport objects, but we were trying to pack something else as well - almost twenty years of life lived in this place. The real estate listing described our house as "a charming two-bedroom property with traditional features." It was not wrong, exactly. But it also did not come close. This has not just been our vacation house. Over the years it became something more - a real home away from home, if that is not too strange a phrase.    The rhythm of returning each summer made us feel, somehow, that we belonged here, at least a little. Though we were never full-time residents, the vi...

This morning, I crawled through muddy, dark Roman-era tunnels below Lisbon.  The tunnels were carved during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for centuries, they directed underground rainwater while empires above rose and fell. Eventually, they were sealed off and forgotten - to be rediscovered completely by chance during the rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake, which turned most of Lisbon into rubble. Today, the crypts are normally completely filled with groundwater, but they are pumped dry on just a couple of days each year, where only a few visitors are allowed access.   Today, I was among the lucky few.  The only entry to the below is through a narrow temporary shaft in the middle of the busy Rua da Conceição, right between the rails of the 28 tram line. The stairs leading down felt steep and risky, and when I finally reached the galleries, a few lights illuminated the void that had stood in total darkness for more than a Millenium. Some passages were s...

Someone told us about LXFactory, and we decided to go and see what the fuss was about. The place is in the Alcantara district, in what used to be the largest spinning mill in Portugal; 23.000 square meters of brick and iron, built in the nineteenth century, abandoned when the work went elsewhere, and then taken over some years ago by the kind of young entrepreneurs who look at an abandoned industrial ruin and see a food court. This is not a criticism. The food court is excellent. We found it by following the sound of people enjoying themselves down the Rua Rodrigues de Faria, and ended up in a courtyard full of mismatched chairs and tables, where someone was selling very good pizza from a kiosk and the 25 de Abril Bridge was visible at the end of the street, doing its best impression of the Golden Gate. Inside the warehouses, which still have their original bones, the high ceilings, the iron columns, the general feeling of a place that once did serious work, there are now stalls ...

Yesterday we walked along Lisbon's shores. We started the day at the crumbling warehouses of Cais do Ginjal, and by evening we were eating golden sardines and moist monkfish. Cais do Ginjal is the waterfront just across the river. It used to be filled with life and workers, but now it stands totally empty. We wandered past locked warehouses with peeling paint and cracked glass. Wildflowers sprouted straight out of the bricks, and most of the walls were covered in graffiti. In one warehouse, a whole wall had collapsed right down, showing all the rusty pipes inside. The jagged hole looked like a gap-toothed grin, as if the building was chuckling at how broken it was. We went inside through a side door hanging loose off the hinges. Broken glass crunched under our shoes as we walked around the dark interior. It was now a place for pigeons, and their cooing echoed around. The sun streamed through broken window panes to light up the dust. Rust bloomed on the old machinery like ora...